Wednesday, November 16, 2016

The Salacious Salon of Sxiploi

An excerpt from the upcoming What Ho,
Frog Demons (fourth book in the Slumbering Ursine Dunes series) for your amusement, a little stylish sub-level inside the
Temple overlooking the Hot Hell in which you can employ the Top Ten Books of Hell list (along with some other guiding boxes in the text
to help with the demonic repartee.

Room 10. Cloakroom. Blixr, a
sickly thin frog-demonette with flaccid urine-yellow skin and a
loose-fitting (but immaculate) white uniform fronted with golden
braid sits on a tall stool here behind a counter. In a terse,
heavily-accented croak she ask for cloaks or other outerwear,
producing from a slit in her wane neck an obsidian token in exchange
for the article of clothing. A delicate cape made from ocular-bat
wing membrane (worth 150 gold pieces) and a heavy ermine coat with
thick shoulder pads and inexplicable rows of cast iron barbs (worth
500 gold pieces) hang on a rack behind her. The demonette will only
attack if the cloak rack is disturbed.

Blixr [AC: 5, HD: 2, Hp: 9, Attk: 2,
claws 1d4]

Room 11. Moist Towelette Room. Two
large white-steel covered buffet trays sit here on a gleaming,
polished marble counter. Two cans of magic sterno (low open flame
burns for 24 hours before running out) sit below the trays warming
neatly-folded moist towelettes. A small sign scrawled in menstrual
blood states “take one and only one and refresh.”

Taking more than one has no
consequence.

Room 12. Salon. The salon is
decorated in the clean, crisp lines of Late Hell Modernist style:
bare, polished rock floor with light thin metal gas burners (mounted
on the wall for illumination) and a long airy window on the southern
wall emitting red light. Through the glass panel (which overlooks
interdimensionally the Hot Hell), a massive pillar of fire can be
seen arching up from a plain of volcanic glass littered with
styrofoam cups. A low, black wood coffee table has three tiny
artfully-arranged delicate bowls containing decorative ebon black,
pale green and blood-red pearls (worth 2,000 gold pieces each) and a
platter of giant fly thoraxes wrapped in lammasu bacon.

Lounging on three low, sleek
hobbit-skin couches are three Type B frog demons, Kanvmp, Hilrtnoc
and Vasescltz, debating and discussing the political dimensions of
soul-juice derivative markets (they vary in the difference of
regulation of said financial instruments) and Hot Hell literary
trends with their host, Sxiploi, a severed donkey head resting on a
velvet cushion. The demons will react to apparent sharp points by the
mute and long deceased head. The debate is punctuated frequently by
droll, cutting gossip about local Marlinko human notables.

The demons will not immediately attack
but will demand that party member participate in their conversation.
Failure to provide more than two real-time minutes of interesting
conversation (or attempts to steal the table bowls or otherwise be a
boor) will bore the demons enough to fight, otherwise they will let
the party come and go with no fuss.

4 comments:

Genius. I can only imagine the kid of suspicioun the PCs would have looking at the sign. I know my PCs probably wouldn't do anything a sign warned them not to for fear of a magical trap.

Incidentally, I have just started up my own gaming blog at sheepandsorcery.blogspot.com. Your work has been a big influence on my GMing and blog writing. I would be fascniated to see your thoughts on the odd way I have used the Eld.

The party met a chained up Mindseer named Bilobax in a chaotic in-between worlds dimension but this psychonaut had developed the odd condition of requiring his purple glasses to use his abilities. So he agreed that if the PCs would let him down, he would tell them where to find the stolen gear. He told them they could have anything but the glasses. Once he got his glasses, he scanned their brains and sent knowledge of their world to the Overmind to prepare for invasion.

One of the PCs rolled high enough on their save to be able to be aware that they had been scanned. They took his glasses and tortured him by repeatedly throwing little rocks at his head. He then fell off a platform on top of a demon from the Hot Hell.

Somehow he made his way to the tournament that the PCs were on their way to, using the demon as a mount in the joust. We haven't gone any farther than that but the PCs actually seem to like Bilobax, who has come to partially enjoy being reapeatedly hit by rocks.